Dish Network Said to Plan Nationwide Satellite Broadband

Dish expects to formally offer the service in late September or early October, mainly to subscribers in rural areas who may not have access to cable broadband, two of the people said. Bob Toevs, a spokesman for Englewood, Colorado-based Dish, declined to comment.

I wonder how much it will cost. 15Mbit/s download speed is quite good, but I am a little disturbed by this statement:

introductory nationwide packages will probably offer rates of 5 megabits so the system can take on more capacity, said one of the people, who declined to be named because the plans are private.

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That's hogwash!

Clearly that person who declined to be named is a marketing weenie/bean counter who only cares about profits. The satellite could care less how many subscribers - it only cares about total bandwidth going through it.

What he is really saying is this: "We could provide 15Mbit/s second download speeds to each subscriber, but instead, we are going to limit each to 5Mbit/sec then sucker... err, I mean sign up 2 more subscribers at 5Mbit/s. So we get 3 times the subscription fees every month."

So when he says "so the system can take on more capacity" he clearly means "more paying customers" and not greater bandwidth capacity.